I don't love you (but I always will)
by Nevertheend127
Summary: Ward promised he'd never hurt Skye. But Daisy- Daisy is fair game. In which every story needs a villain, and Ward does not disappoint.


**I don't love you (but I always will)**

 **A/U- I am so sorry! Figure i should start apologizing to everyone right off the bat about being gone so long- I was moving, so, super busy.**

 **I was in a rush to get this posted, so I'm sorry if there are some mistakes! Actually, if this whole thing makes sense to you, you're as insane as I am ^_^ (Or as sleep-deprived)**

 **Not strictly smut, but this is still the filthiest thing I have ever written ;)**

 **(Also, this changes scene and perspective at the speed of light. Try to keep up.)**

* * *

The first few weeks without him are hard.

She misses him. Misses the berratement and the lectures and the theatrics of his war-stories that get worse every time he tells them. God, he was so dramatic.

And powerful. And beautiful. And terrifying.

She puts four bullets in him in a doorway in Puerto Rico, and expects never to see him again, for one reason or another.

x

He comes back, and he's not playing the broken little victim anymore. Well, he is, but not in the same way. There's this smug little smile she's never, never seen on him before, and an arrogance in his voice and in his eyes.

God, she looked up to him. She idolized him. He was her teacher, a goddamn authority figure to her.

And now he doesn't look at her. Doesn't want her. Or need her.

Now there's nothing in his eyes when he looks at her but grudging amusement. She thinks she'd prefer it if he hated her.

x

He's clearly lost all interest in her, but Daisy still wants his attention, not because she loves him, but because no one ever loved her the way he used to. And she may be sort of still be in love with the memory of him.

x

Now they're locked in combat, desperately trying to kill each other without actually killing each other. It's a complicated relationship.

x

"What are you after?" She snarls.

"Closure." He says, like that's the end of it, and he sends her sprawling down a flight of stairs.

She has a feeling he means a lot more than he's saying. Like 'I will never lie to you,' couldn't have just been a promise of honesty. That was a promise of… she doesn't want to think about what he was promising her.

Especially not now, with her agents off-grid and a bomb ticking in the building's basement.

x

Ward promised he would never hurt Skye, that bubbly girl in a silly pink dress.

He never made any promises about Daisy.

Ward throws her through a window and she blasts him through a solid wall. He slams her head against a filing cabinet (he has the nerve to apologize, like it was a fucking accident) and she splinters every bone in the hand that did it to her.

They're always a few blows shy of doing each other serious damage.

Well. He is, anyway.

x

"Hellfire? Seriously?" Daisy leers, taunting him. He barely glances her direction, so she changes tactics. "You barely knew her, Ward." She accuses. "She was a blank slate. Admit it, you used her."

He bristles. She's struck a nerve. Usually, he ignores her, unless she does something reckless to make him laugh at her stupidity.

Bringing up Kara was apparently a step too far.

He strikes at the same time she does, painting the windows around them with an orange glow. Fire, channeled through the chain in his grasp, flashes before her eyes without any threat of hurting her.

Well. That was practically a love bite. She can do better.

x

She throws her shoulders back and sends out a pulse that would have sent human Ward through the nearest wall. And then some.

But he's different now, he's powered, and apparently this means he manages to merely stumble a few feet before cackling and sending a jet of scarlet flames that narrowly miss her face.

If she hadn't cut her hair short, her whole head would be ablaze about now.

She can't tell if he's trying to control himself- if he's trying to hurt her a little bit, or a lot, or not at all.

She knows she's holding back. Sort of. Maybe.

x

Jemma's still missing, and Skye can hear Fitz crying though the wall. She meets him in the kitchen at three o'clock every night, like clockwork. She figures drizzling the bourbon into a tea cup instead of a shot glass makes it more soothing. She's wrong, but he doesn't care. He cries no matter what they're drinking out of.

She does too.

x

They're standing five feet apart in some old-fashioned office buliding of an abandoned warehouse in God Knows Where, and he's asking her what colateral she can offer him in exchange for his cooperation. Bastard.

"Take me." She says, staring him straight in the eye.

Ward doesn't burst out laughing. He does, however, get that enraging little smirk that makes her warm between her legs. "What?" He repeats, as if he doesn't understand. He's going to make her spell it out.

"You asked what I have to offer in exchange for the agents you took. I'm offering."

"I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more specific." Ward's lips are still, but his shoulders are twitching. He's laughing at her.

Daisy feels her cheeks flush. She runs a finger down the neckline of her shirt, pulling down a little in the center. He may laugh, but his eyes snap down towards her breasts, as fast and as obvious as ever.

"Fuck me, you bastard." She clarifies, stressing every syllable. "Let my agents go, unharmed, and I'll let you have me however you want."

He doesn't flinch, and in that moment she sees the old Ward shining through. The faceless soldier (with one hell of a face) who was phased by nothing.

Then his lips twist into something dirty and smug, and he turns his back on her. "You sure think a lot of yourself, don't you?" He says to the corner. "Girl I used to know never would have made that deal."

"That 'girl' is dead." Daisy snarls, because whoever Skye was, she was too soft for this world.

"Shame. She was a looker."

Daisy lunges for him, the same time he snatches a lamp off the desk and swings it at her.

Skye was weak. Skye was soft. Skye trusted and loved and needed. She was a weakness, and weakness had to be stamped out.

Ward's hand curl around her throat the same time she ices him in the chest. There's a sort of red glow in his eyes, and his body absorbs the hit like it's nothing.

That girl in the pink dress was too nice for this world.

x

He stubbornly calls her 'Skye,' even years later, when everyone refers to her as 'Daisy.'

"It's cute." He assures her, with mock politeness as they 'catch up' during a fight that's leveling the shopping center around them. (Because that's a totally logical place to do battle.) "It's just not your name."

"No one calls me Skye." She hisses back, and he catches the fist she swings at him, locking it in his grasp so she's right against his chest.

"I'm not no one, Sweetheart." He says.

x

"We've gotta stop meeting like this." His words are harsh and hot against her neck, teeth burning patterns into her skin. "I'm starting to think you want to run into me, Skye."

Well, fuck everything.

He's going to pay for that.

She arches her back, grinding back against his hips with this wicked little twist that makes all the air go out of his lungs.

"It's Daisy." She corrects, and feels him harden against the small of her back.

That shuts him up.

When Ward can breathe, he dips a hand between her legs to paw at her through her jeans, rough and ineligant. "Okay, Sweetheart." He growls, and she arches again. "If that's how you want to play it."

There's nothing remotely gentle about what follows. She tears open his jeans, he leaves bruises on her neck. He rolls her clit between his fingers as she pulls his hair and mewls like a kitten.

Ward tips her back across the bar that they've only partially destroyed during their epic fight-scene. A younger version of Skye would have probably been estatic. Daisy is just disgusted she hasn't killed him yet.

And then Ward's driving into her, fucking her so hard and so fast she forgets her own name.

She's having no trouble remembering his, though. She kind of sort of screams it, and everything that's not nailed down slides around the room or rattles or shatters.

And he's above her, around her, inside of her, and all she can hear is her name on his lips, "Skye, Skye, Skye."

x

"Um. Daisy." Bobbi asks cautiously, as she watches her wrap her knuckles tight enough to split the skin.

"Yeah?" Daisy doesn't look up.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Fine." Daisy assures her.

No one needs to know, no matter how it twists at her insides. No one needs to know how loudly she screamed when Ward first thrust into her. No one needs to know how he kept licking, lapping, kissing at her cunt, long after she had already come. No one needs to know how he looks at her, reverently, desperately, almost obsessively, and she'd be terrified of him if she had any sense or morality left.

x

Wasn't he supposed to have moved on? Wasn't she? Weren't they supposed to have been realistic about this? Accepted that their relationship was a thing of the past and...? And...?

Damn him and his perfect, logic-defying eyes. What are words, again?

x

No matter how sorry she is, she'll never forgive him. He tried to take her away from her family, to cut her away from herself so she'd be forced to love him back. That's pretty fucked up.

She needs him. She needs him. She needs him.

x

She hates him, because that's what she's supposed to do.

x

"You really don't know, do you?" He breathes, voice raspy and spent from shouting her name when he came down her throat.

Skye licks off the heel of her hand, catches his eye, feels his softening cock twitch feebly under her hands.

"Know what, Ward?" She grits out, in a way that suggests she didn't just blow him in the basement of some ritzy casino they should currently be evacuating. "Know that you're a murdering phsycopath? Cause that's not news."

He just shakes his head and offers her a hand up. She never takes it.

x

One of these days, this will have to end. They're going to have to realize they need to end this thing between them, before one of them gets seriously hurt. By the other.

Between putting her up against a wall and trying to put her through a wall, Ward doesn't have the time to reason through this.

x

The next time he sees her, they barely bother to spar. There's no preface, no ceremony, just the two of them tumbling to the floor and clawing at each others' clothes.

He calls her Kara, just once, by accident.

Skye rages all hell.

She kicks him off, storms out, and slamming the door may put a barrier between them but it does nothing to muffle the sound of her sobs.

x

This is insane. And Ward doesn't do 'insane.' Twisted, vicious, relentless, cruel, sure- all are fair descriptions. But he's always had his head on straight.

This is insanity.

But even now, with her stupid 'Caterpillar' and her heroic complex and her stupid, stupid (God, he's still working on ideas to kill the guy) boyfriend, Lincoln, (who is stupid) he is still too in love with her to deny her anything. (Stupid.)

Sex. Resources. Power. A lot of sex. That's mostly what Skye wants from him.

How is it that she still can't understand? Does she really not know what she was to him?

After all this time.

She is the reason for everything wrong with him, everything soft, everything weak.

He wonders if he'd be at peace, if she died. The thought makes him want to be sick.

x

The next time he sees her, the rest of the team is present. This is it. This is the ultimate good-guy/bad-guy showdown where the unlikely hero slays her ghosts. And that's what he is. That's all he is.

Her villain. Her nemesis. Her Ghost.

Ward is the Big Bad Wolf and the Evil King and the the Mad Scientist, every classic villain snowballed into one. He wants to hurt, to tear, to kill.

But not his Skye. Never Skye.

He wants her dead. He can't kill her. She needs to die. He'd sooner take a bullet himself. She's an angel.

She's his own personal circle of hell.

Mary.

Daisy.

Skye.

x

"You'll have to kill me." Skye shrills, throwing out her arms. "I won't let you hurt them!"

Behind her, people cower. He laughs, throwing flames into the air so golden chains of light reflect against her skin. For a moment, she looks wild. Blood in her hair, uniform ripped, eyes glowing red in the firelight.

She could have been _his_.

"You're risking an awful lot on me not wanting to hurt you, Sweetheart," He spits out.

"Then do it." She challanges. "Kill me."

He can't. He can't. He can't he can't he's so weak he can't do it-

x

Her hands are fisted in the neck of his jacket, and he's pounding into her with a kind of ferocity no one else would dare dream of. But Ward's not afraid of her. He never has been.

"Grant." she whines, and because this is the only time he's aloud to touch her (when she's too dazed and disoriented to care) he buries his face in her hair.

"Say it," he says, wanting for all the world to sound smug, but it just comes across as pleading. "Say it, and I'll let you come."

"Fuck you." She snarls, and the pad of his thumb ghosts over her clit.

Skye jerks at the sensation, clumsily banging her head against the railing of the spiral staircase (the same one he cuffed her to, in what feels like another life) and his hand flies up on instinct to cradle the back of her head. "Say it." He growls.

"I- I need you." She admits. "I don't... Grant, please... I need... I need..."

He threads his fingers through her short hair, twists the ends around his wrists. "Come." he orders, and presses calloused knuckles against her clit.

She _breaks_.

x

They're enemies now, but he can't bring himself to hurt her.

Whether or not he loves her, it still feels wrong, awful, unnatural to so much as raise a hand against her.

It goes against instinct.

He does it anyway, because her story needs a villain and he's not about to lie down and let her kill him.

If she needs to be the hero- then by all means, he'll let her be one.

x

"Grant!" She shrieks his name, thighs squeezing around his head, and when she comes the windows rattle. Huh. He can probably do better than that.

It becomes a sort of game, (all things are, with him,) one he's been calling, "How-many-things-can-I-cause-Skye-to-break-with-just-my-tongue, two player edition." She swears she'll kick him out of bed for that. He buries his laugh between her legs, and the answer to his question/game is answered very quickly as books clatter from the shelves, furniture scrapes across the floor, and picture frames send out sprays of broken glass like popping bubbles.

Fine. He wins. He fucking wins, she'll admit. Just not to him.

x

They reach an impass when she gets between him and Coulson.

"Skye." He says sternly. "Out of the way."

"It's Daisy." She snarls, in a way she never corrects him when they're alone. "Get away from him."

"Oh, but isn't this precious?" He lilts, in that vicious, snarky-sweet tone he's always had. The one that drives her up the walls. "Daddy doesn't know, does he?"

"Daisy?" Coulson stutters. Oh no. Oh no. Ward can't- he won't-

"Didn't tell him, then, how often you've been seeing me?" Ward guesses, and the grin on his face is absolutely wolfish. "Didn't tell him how you've been getting over

Daisy grabs the vibrations mid-air and throws the words back down his throat. Well. That's one way of describing it. They kind of dissolve mid-air- she's certain Coulson hasn't heard.

He seems to have gotten the idea, however. She can feel his eyes on her- horrified, disappointed, betrayed.

And she can feel Ward's eyes on her. Disgusted, greedy, expectant.

She can't look at either of them. With a swipe of her hand, she drags every dust particle from the ancient ceiling, the tiled walls, the battered carpet- creates a dense fog that swirls as she runs through it, as Coulson's gun goes off but she knows Ward is long gone.

x

"You could have just ended it." Skye says, not looking at him.

Ward doesn't say anything. Just stares out at the yellow lines of sunlight that crest over the city.

"You could have just said, "Skye, I want to stop fucking and act like civilized mortal enemies. You didn't have to tell _Coulson_."

He doesn't say anything.

Right. Back to fucking ignoring her.

"I miss you." She blurts out, finally. "Every day. Like, the old you."

"I know," He says, and turns away. Today he helped her. Saved a team of her agents. Tomorrow, maybe, he'll be the one threatening them. She has no idea who he is anymore. She doesn't miss how he doesn't say it back.

x

He fights back like he means it, trying to recall the searing pain of four bullets she put into him. But when he looks at her, all he can think of is a very different kind of pain beneath his ribs, unfamiliar, unwelcome, unshakeable. He'd loved her with all that was left of his malformed heart, and those feelings have run too deep for him to ever enjoy the sight of her in tears, in anguish, in pain.

Kara never made him this weak.

x

Some days they work together, a brittle alliance forged by nostalgia and fond memories and bitter desperation. Some days (most days,) they're enemies, and there's nothing to keep them at each other's throats but broken hearts and an unbroken promise.

He will never lie to her.

(Translation: He's hers. Forever. Nothing either of them can do about it.)

(Translation: Yeah, they're fucked. They might not care.)

* * *

 **AN- don't judge me, Skyeward looks like it's over and it's depressing me. So I decided to fix my angst with… more angst. Because… logic!**


End file.
